NINE-year-old Edgar was strolling down the street in pre-war Munich when he glanced into a nearby garden.

Edgar outside Hitler’s flat in Munich – Edgar’s family had one in the block opposite

There, relaxing in a deckchair and dozing in the sun, he saw a neighbour who lived directly opposite him. Edgar, who was Jewish, felt no cause for alarm. Yet this fellow city dweller was none other than Adolf Hitler, then resident in Munich and on his way to becoming the most dangerous and fearsome tyrant of the 20th century.

And as such Edgar, now the 91-year-old distinguished historian Edgar Feuchtwanger, witnessed some of the most dangerous and notorious events in the run-up to war. Edgar’s family was well-known in pre-war Germany.

His uncle was Lion Feuchtwanger, a successful author in the Weimar republic who incurred the wrath of the authorities when in 1930 – the year of Hitler’s electoral breakthrough – he published a novel called Success, which lampooned the German leader as “Rupert Kutzner”, a garage mechanic with a populist touch, who founds a party called the Truly Germans.

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When they came to power, which they did shortly afterwards, Goebbels said that Lion would be “smoked out”, for as far back as 1920 he had been warning about the terrible danger threatened by the rise of Hitler.

He was indeed persecuted by the Nazis but eventually he and his wife found refuge in the United States. Even so Edgar, his father Ludwig, a well-known academic publisher, and his mother Erna Rosina lived a fairly normal life in Munich until 1938, when it became clear that as a Jewish family their lives were in danger and they would have to leave.

Edgar watched the goings-on across the road with no idea that he was seeing history being made. On his walk to school he would admire the silver Mercedes belonging to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer and the employer of Eva Braun, who would later become Hitler’s mistress.

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British PM at the time Neville Chamberlain visited Hitler's flat

When Hitler moved in, his housekeeper was his half-sister Angela Raubal. Angela had a daughter, Geli, and Hitler had an affair with his half-niece. In September 1931 Geli shot herself in the apartment, initiating a personal and political crisis for Hitler.

Edgar believes that this might be the reason the Führer never gave up the flat and kept the room she lived in untouched. That was just a foretaste of what was to come. In the early 1930s when Hitler was chancellor, Edgar, then about nine, would be taken out for walks with his nanny and would see Hitler, dressed in mackintosh and trilby hat which he would lift to acknowledge bystanders who shouted “Heil Hitler”, travelling with just one or two cars.

But as the years wore on and his monomania grew, he would have a motorcade of four or five long black Mercedes. When he was ready to depart the drivers would start revving their engines: the Führer would emerge, now always dressed in military uniform, get into the lead car and roar off.

He would be followed by his black-shirted bodyguards, their jackboots making a huge noise. As his power grew he would travel the length and breadth of Germany, stopping briefly at his Munich flat before heading to the Berghof, his country retreat.

Another near neighbour, who Edgar witnessed voting at a cinema that had been converted into a polling station, was Ernst Röhm. Röhm was the head of the SA or Stormtroopers, the paramilitary wing of the Nazis and as such a very close associate of Hitler’s until he turned out to be a threat.

In 1938, when Edgar was 13, he saw Hitler returning to his flat in a large retinue of opentopped Mercedes in his familiar pose standing in his car, holding the windscreen with his left arm, while the right was raised in the Nazi salute

He was leading an organisation that dwarfed the German army. On June 30, 1934, Edgar was woken by the sound of car doors slamming and raucous noises from the street: craning through the window he saw Hitler drive off to Tegernsee where he arrested Röhm and a host of fellow SA leaders (Edgar recounts that most of them were alleged to be in bed with rent boys) and had them shot.

Similar executions were taking place across Germany, including that of General von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor and this event subsequently became known as the Night of the Long Knives, which consolidated Hitler’s power.

The armed forces swore allegiance to Hitler and the terrible events leading up to war began. Remarkably, life still continued with some degree of normality. Edgar remembers holidaying on Lake Starnberg.

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The time leading up to the Second World War was hardest on the Jewish population

Two children present in the village where they were staying had been orphaned in the Night of the Long Knives. No one dared say anything to their faces but once, after they left the village shop, the shopkeeper murmured, “Poor children.”

But war was becoming inevitable. In March 1938, when Edgar was 13, he saw Hitler returning to his flat in a large retinue of opentopped Mercedes in his familiar pose standing in his car, holding the windscreen with his left arm, while the right was raised in the Nazi salute. Hitler was in a good mood.

He was back from the Anschluss, the annexation of ­Austria, which marked the moment there was no going back. In September that year Edgar witnessed Mussolini visiting Hitler’s Munich abode; two months after that came the arrest of his own father and the realisation that the family would have to leave.

They managed to gain visas to Britain and in February 1939 Edgar went on ahead, accompanied by his father to the Dutch border. The family was reunited in May. There was plenty of dark humour in what was going on.

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As a jew, Edgar had to carry identity papers

Although Edgar didn’t see it, Hitler’s flat was also where the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain visited when he signed a declaration that he believed had achieved “peace with honour”. The German people, though, realised the declaration wasn’t worth the paper it was written on and as Hitler continued to rampage around Europe, annexing countries everywhere, would say, “Chamberlain takes his weekends in the country. Hitler takes a country at the weekend.”

The end came for the Feuchtwangers when Ludwig was arrested by the Gestapo during the events of Kristallnacht – the series of deadly attacks against the Jewish community across Germany in November 1938 – and imprisoned for six weeks.

On his release, ­Ludwig was shaven-headed was covered with bruises and had the first signs of frostbite. The family realised they would have to flee. They did so, making it to Britain six months before Hitler seized Czechoslovakia and Europe headed towards a terrible war.

Edgar ended up studying at Winchester and then Cambridge, going on to teach history at the University of Southampton and writing a series of well received books. In time he married and had children of his own.

But as a historian he has had a unique perspective on the history of the 20th century, viewing its greatest monster at close quarters. A strange neighbour indeed.

* To order I Was Hitler’s Neighbour by Edgar Feuchtwanger (Bretwalda, £11.99), call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 with card details. Or send a cheque or postal order payable to Express Bookshop, to: Bretwalda Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.com UK delivery is free.